


girl scout cookie

by firstaudrina



Category: Heathers (1988)
Genre: F/F, Red - Freeform, Sapphic September, plaid, terrible teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:46:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26756017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: Veronica Sawyer hadn’t asked for it. But it was what she got.
Relationships: Heather Chandler/Veronica Sawyer
Comments: 6
Kudos: 66





	girl scout cookie

**Author's Note:**

> Set pre-series.

Veronica Sawyer hadn’t asked for it. But it was what she got.

Heather found her in the cafeteria at the end of sophomore year, wearing chunky socks with her hair in a bun stuck through with a pencil, glasses perpetually pushed up onto her head and clacking back onto her nose any time she looked down. She and Betty Finn carried binders and bags bulging with textbooks, laughing over whatever girls like that laughed about — G-rated movies and miscopied science notes. But Heather could see Veronica’s bored eye roving sometimes, the _harrumph_ of her restlessly twisting mouth.

It was the last week of school. Heather was doing the lunchtime poll. They let her get way out with it when school was almost over because no one ever read the last issue of the paper; instead it ended up smashed underfoot, crumpled in trash cans, lining bird cages. Heather said, “So you go under the knife to get the perfect little ski-slope nose, but when you wake up from the surgery, they tell you there were these complications and instead you got a total oinker. What do you do?”

“Die, I guess,” Veronica said dryly, poking at her moist cafeteria fries, grease on her fingers.

“I don’t know, I think pig noses are kind of cute,” laughed Betty Finn. “I’d probably try to make the best of it.” Self-deprecatingly, she added, “Couldn’t be worse than what I’ve got now.” Veronica smiled at her, but Heather saw the mold all over it, a grin that was green at the edges. Betty Finn was such a powder puff.

“You’re beautiful,” Veronica declared and Betty blushed into her smile but Heather kept her eye on Veronica, calculating so fast there must have been steam coming out of her ears. Veronica looked at her, like _what_ , an aggressive kind of look that Heather didn’t get a lot of — burnouts were boring, nerds were needy, Heather was so empty-headed it was a wonder she could make it to school every day, and Heather was so fucking fragile it made Heather’s stomach turn. Heather didn’t need another Heather. Veronica was a big block of marble, but Heather could see the shape inside it. Veronica was like her — hungry but unfed, a piranha in a placid lake. Heather decided to save her from herself. 

Heather fell into step with Veronica on the way out the door on the last day, their classmates rushing out for summer and Veronica lingering, watching them like they were something out of the Discovery Channel. “Hey, girl,” Heather said, her padded shoulder bumping into Veronica’s slack one, plaid against knit. “Don’t be a stranger.”

She didn’t look back as she skipped down the steps. You never look back.

Heather had studied Veronica in those last few days. She got good grades but she never listened in class, sometimes staring out the window and other times scribbling feverishly in her notebook, glasses slipping to the very tip of her nose and occasionally sliding off. “I don’t know how you do it, you never study,” Betty Finn said in the lunch line, sighing over her B+ math quiz to Veronica’s easy A.

“Oh, you know, two plus two is four.” Veronica was impatient but stymied, going nowhere fast. “Hey, did you do the slip? Ready for your very first game of hooky?” 

Betty hemmed and hawed, her teeth digging into her lower lip. “I don’t know, Ronnie. I can’t really do my mom’s handwriting and if she ever finds out I lied —”

“Come on,” Veronica huffed, forgetting to be gracious for a minute, just wanting to get out of Dodge. She plucked a piece of paper from her binder and took the pen from her hair, all that dark brown falling around her shoulders in one fell swoop. “No one cares the last week. No one’ll ever even know.” 

And with Heather’s own eyes she saw Veronica dash off the ideal worried-mother sick note, sign _Mrs. Finn_ with a flourish, and stick it folded onto Betty’s tray. Betty laughed, like Heather Duke laughed when Heather told her to do something she didn’t want to do, trying not to make waves. She didn’t think Veronica even noticed. She was revving all the time. 

Heather didn’t see her over the summer because she had better things to do, like cruises and second stews, but as soon as they got back she stepped up behind Veronica Sawyer and pulled the pen out of her hair, held onto it. “I’m having a few girls over after school to soothe the sting of returning to Westerburg,” she said, as though they talked every day. “You in?”

“Oh, yeah,” Veronica snorted, the whole thing a big joke. “Make sure to save me some pâté.”

“Don’t be a pillowcase.” Heather slipped the pen into the pocket of her plaid blazer, even though she only ever wrote in red. “It’s croquet and cocktails, and it’s an order, not an invitation. And Sawyer? Lose the glasses. What is this, 1955?”

Veronica was still doubtful. She stood like she didn’t care about being pretty, with her shoulders stooped and hips cocked, nails all short and bitten, no makeup on. It was ironic. A face like hers could do some damage. “What do you want with me, Heather? Aren’t I a little low on the totem pole for you?”

Heather shrugged. “I heard you were a forger par excellence. Never discount a special skill.”

Veronica ended up in Heather’s bedroom with her and Heather and Heather, smiling grimly and sitting on her hands while they did their nails. Heather had made them all gin and tonics, heavy on the gin, but Veronica hadn’t touched hers.

“I hate green,” Heather whined, looking down at her stubby, forest green nails, only half the hand done. “I look like the Wicked Witch of the West. Can’t I have red?”

“I don’t know, Heather,” Heather said with patience she didn’t have, all low and slow. “Can you?”

It spooked Heather enough that she shut up for the time being, sucking it up and dabbing that tiny brush over the rest of her fingers. Heather was doing yellow; Heather obviously red. It was her signature. She’d been wearing it since the seventh grade with nary a chip; she even kept a bottle in her bookbag for touch-ups. Heather knew that, and her insistence on asking anyway was another little notch against her. She knew it, too. Her expression had sunk in with shame and she was clearly running the words over in her head, sour-stomached. 

Veronica saw this, too. “What difference does it make?” She pulled her hands free and grabbed the red from Heather, a palpable _suck_ going through the room when she did it, everyone waiting for what Heather would do. Veronica dropped the bottle next to Heather, red and green like Christmas decorations.

Heather smiled. “You’re one of those.”

“One of what?”

Heather didn’t answer, but she thought, _feisty_ , a fighter. She’d made plenty of girls crumple, but she never had to work this hard. “I think blue’s your color.” She could see it, navy against that ivory skin. Cool as ice. “What do you say?”

Veronica stared at Heather and Heather stared at Veronica staring at Heather until a bead of green nail polish dripped off the end of her brush and landed on her skirt. “Fuck!” she exclaimed, jumping up, and Heather snorted, felt a heat in the pit of her stomach like the morning after a successful kegger. 

Heather took Veronica’s hand to examine her nails. “At least it’ll stop you biting them.” She picked up the file to even them out herself. Heather and Heather exchanged a look, but said nothing. 

After that they played croquet, getting stupid drunk because Veronica made up rules that meant they had to do a shot for every shot, a shot for every miss. They were giggling helplessly by the time the sun sank down, Heather McNamara leaning on her mallet until she overbalanced and fell over, then pulling Heather Duke down with her when she tried to help. They tried to grab for Heather too, but she wasn’t such a dust ruffle, she could hold her liquor even if it made her pink-cheeked and light-headed. “Please, like I’m getting grass stains on my Ungaro for the likes of you.”

“If you’re not faking an orgasm for a college boy, the grass stains just aren’t worth it, huh,” Veronica quipped, and Heather and Heather did a daytime talk show-worthy _oooOOOooo_ before getting lost in laughter again. 

“What would you know about it,” Heather said, ballet flat on the ball, mallet drawing back. “I’ve never seen you at a Remington party.”

“That’s not the only place in this town where you can have bad sex,” Veronica said. “Believe me, you can find it anywhere there’s a teenage boy with a pulse.”

“You’re funny.” Heather gave her the compliment like a gift and she could see Veronica enjoy it despite herself, enjoy it in a way that made her feel a little bit bad, too. “Your turn.”

The other girls left eventually — Heather to get pawed by Ram in the back of a coupe with bad gas mileage and Heather to her lonely room, probably humping a pillow while she thought about _Moby Dick_. Veronica stayed. Heather didn’t tell her to go. Instead she poured sloppy drinks until the bottle was empty, then got red wine out of the cellar to fill the glasses instead, the tastes mixing in a toxic way that felt good, because it was about getting drunk and not much else.

Then Heather said, “Let’s make this interesting.” 

Veronica’s eyebrow lifted, a perfect arch. “Oh?”

“For every one you get —” Heather neatly whacked the ball through a wicket. “Your opponent loses an item of clothing. If I have to look at that hideous sweater one second longer, I’m going to spew.”

Veronica checked to make sure she was serious, then unbuttoned the sweater and shrugged it off onto the grass. “And your whole —” Veronica did a little whoop-di-do with her finger at Heather, gesturing from shoulder to shoulder, before she readied her next strike. “Situation is much better?”

Incredulous, Heather said, “It’s designer.” 

“ _O_ kay,” came out with a huff of sarcasm that seemed to imply, _and?_ The blue ball sailed through the wicket. “Deal’s a deal.”

The blazer was double-breasted, four buttons that she unhooked with one hand, the other curled coolly around the handle of the mallet. She left it on the ground.

Heather didn’t lose, but losing this game was winning, too. She got Veronica down to her depressingly rectangular skirt and beige bra, leggings kicked off, bare feet in the grass. Veronica gave as good as she got. Heather’s frilled button-down hung long enough over her hips to hide her red hi-cut panties, but she’d stripped off just about everything else. 

“So what is this?” Veronica leaned on the mallet, hands folded under her chin, eyes big and curious. She hadn’t worn her glasses. “Blackmail material?”

“Anything I’ve got on you, you’ve got on me.” Heather pressed back against one of the stupid stone statues her mother thought were _so_ very, angling herself so she was all legs. 

“What have you got on me?” Veronica was sparking, not bored at all, not looking anywhere else. She was sharp, not even tipsy though she’d packed it away enough that she should be by now. 

“Nothing.” Heather pushed off and knocked the mallet out from under Veronica, catching her by the waistband of the skirt and pulling her in so she collided with Heather, her skin almost clammy in September’s indecisive atmosphere. “Not yet, anyway.”

Veronica began, “I didn’t know you were…”

“Say something stupid. I dare you.”

Veronica almost chuckled, then reached up to pull the red scrunchie from Heather’s hair so it fell, fluffed and puffed, over her shoulders. “Wouldn’t dream of it.” 

After, they sat on opposite white wrought-iron chairs like business associates finishing up a board meeting. “You tell anyone, I tell everyone,” Heather said, clipping her stockings back to her pristine white garters. “They’ll think you’re some obsessed little nerd on a mission of misguided vengeance. I mean, who would ever even believe it?”

Veronica rolled her eyes. Her hair was all tousled but her back was straighter; her eyes gleamed. “Whatever you’ve got on me, I have on you.” She picked up the blazer and tossed it; Heather caught it easily. “No grass stains. But I don’t think you were faking.”

Heather pressed her lips together tightly, but the corners curled anyway. “Leave your weirdo’s weeds in the back of the closet from now on, Sawyer,” she said. “I’ll see you at lunch.”


End file.
